First week of September 2023 the TiPES group met up in Spain to share the newest knwoledge within Tipping Points of the Erath System generated by the project, which is H2020 funded.
There is rising concern that several subsystems of the Earth may respond highly nonlinearly at critical future levels of anthropogenic forcing; these levels have recently been associated with tipping points (TPs). It is paramount to identify safe operating spaces for humanity and the planet in terms of these critical forcing levels in order to prevent harmful transitions to alternative, undesirable states of the Earth system. The mechanisms leading to such abrupt transitions are only partly understood, and further research in this regard is urgently needed.
State-of-art Earth System Models appear to respond too smoothly at TPs and have difficulties in simulating abrupt transitions that occurred in the planet’s history.
TiPES aims to better quantify the tipping elements that are present in the climate system and to ensure that climate projections also include these. In this final meeting held September 2023, the main conclusions and results of the project was presented, and interactions with other EU H2020 projects tackling similar problems was discussed.
The meeting took place at Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual a facility for the Spanish scientific system in Benasque, a beautiful village located in the heart of the Pyrenees. The meeting was organized by M. Montoya (UCM) with support from N. Boers (Technical University of Munich), P. Ditlevsen (Niels Bohr Institute), and H. A. Kjær (Niels Bohr Institute).